THEY Screw up and we pay . . . WHY?

By l.t. Dravis

WALL STREET/WASHINGTON, D.C. – Sunday, September 21, 2008 – Without your knowledge and without your permission, the Bush administration has decided to put you, your children, and grandchildren into more trillions of dollars of debt for decades to come.

Why?

Because, after years of deregulation, greed, and mismanagement, Wall Street has finally run out of cash.

George W. Bush, not particularly regarded to be the brightest or most courageous President we’ve ever had, the guy who’s been laying low for the past several days, had to be pressed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to finally do something to prevent the entire economy of the United States from collapsing under the weight of last week’s Wall Street crisis.

According to Treasury Secretary Paulson, the Wall Street crisis has caused credit markets to become “very fragile and frozen” and if the government doesn’t give billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, businesses will no longer be able to borrow money to stay in business and those consumers lucky enough to still have jobs will be unable to get the credit they need to go further into debt so they can keep on spending.

If the Bush administration doesn’t hand over billions to Wall Street, immediately, Paulson says our economy will grind to a halt.

So Bush, et al, will give Wall Street what it wants for the privilege of taking ‘illiquid’ (who came up with that moniker?) mortgage-backed securities and other bad debt off their hands and off their balance sheets.

Translation: The same batch of political knuckleheads who deregulated us into the mortgage meltdown and the Wall Street crumbledown will now borrow hundreds of billions, perhaps even trillions of dollars from China and other sources, sign our names to the loan documents, and then hand all those stacks of cash over to the same group of geniuses who mismanaged Wall Street into its current mess.

This blow out of taxpayer cash comes on the heels of hundreds of billions of dollars the Bush administration has already given away to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in business and to prevent insurance giant, American International Group, from going under.

How sound does that sound?

To add insult to injury, though the Bush administration, the House, and the Senate trust us enough to obligate us and our families for generations of debt, they don’t trust us enough to give us the details about the whys, wherefores, and whereas-es of this so-called bailout.

And, though we’ve heard and seen enough ‘political leader’ interviews over the past few days to last a lifetime, not one of those ‘leaders’ has had enough respect for us regular folks to actually tell us anything close to the truth about what really happened on Wall Street last week, about what the future implications may be, about how much this bailout will really cost, and about what the House and Senate will do to prevent a future reoccurrence of incompetence and fraud on his scale.

Though the Bush administration says it wants “as much as $700 billion” to clean up this mess, after everything we’ve been told over the past 7 ½ years by them, does anyone seriously think we can trust them to tell us the truth now?

Truth is, this lack of thoughtful, intelligent leadership on the part of the Bush administration could cost hundreds of millions of Americans $1, $2, $3, $4, $5 trillion or more.

Did you ever think that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, even with the help of their cohorts in the House and Senate, could lead this nation into such a deep economic disaster in only 7 ½ years?

The irony is that we put this downward spiral in motion when we voted for two men who made it blatantly clear to anyone who would listen that they were willing to say or do anything to win an election or start a war or run an economy into the ground . . . for political gain.

Hmmm.

Shame on who?

Copyright © 2008 by l.t. Dravis. All rights reserved.

If you have questions, comments, or concerns, Email me at LTDAssociates@msn.com (goes right to my desk) and since I personally answer every Email, I look forward to hearing from you soon.

OH, John McCain, we hardly knew ye . . .

By l.t. Dravis

JUNEAU, ALASKA – MONDAY, September 1, 2008 - Oh, oh, some Republican campaign insiders are worried that John McCain’s first ‘presidential decision’ reveals something about his judgment that voters won’t like.

He chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his Vice-Presidential running mate and though she’s only been on the national scene for a few days now, we find out that McCain didn’t bother to seriously ‘vet’ her.

Why?

Could it be that McCain’s need to attract attention to his campaign, to satisfy the hard-core conservative base he can’t reach, and/or to grab the hearts and votes of disaffected Hillary-ites, was so desperate that he jumped at the first female running mate he could find . . . without really knowing what he was getting into?

Now we learn that McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, snookered us over the weekend when he said that all the final VP candidates underwent a complete records review and a FBI background check.

The FBI said today that it didn’t do a background check on Palin or any of McCain’s other choices.

What the . . . ?

So, who’s checking out Governor Palin, now?

While McCain campaign operatives scramble to Alaska now to do what they should have done weeks ago, the press has been doing its inevitably thorough job and here’s what they dug up so far:

· The Governor has hired an attorney to represent her in the Alaska legislative ethics investigation regarding whether she abused her power when she fired a public safety commissioner because he refused to fire Mrs. Palin’s former brother-in-law

· Governor Palin evidently belonged to the Alaska Independence Party which has favored Alaska’s secession from the United States

· The governor’s husband evidently has a DUI arrest record dating back nearly 22 years ago

· The Palin’s 17 year old daughter, Bristol, is 5-months pregnant and she is supposedly going to marry the father

So what?

Who cares?

As far as ‘TrooperGate’ is concerned, let the abuse of power investigation take its course. Besides, what’s wrong with Sarah hiring an attorney? Don’t they all do that?

Sarah Palin belonged to the Alaska Independence Party, the party that has called for Alaska’s secession from the union. Big deal! She belonged to the AIP seventeen or eighteen years ago. What possible difference could that make today? Alaska isn’t going anyplace, is it?

Sarah’s husband has a DUI! That’s nothing! Bush and Cheney have five or six or seven DUIs, combined! Mr. Palin has a long way to go before he could ever catch up with the masters!

So the Palin’s 17 year old daughter is five months pregnant! Plenty of teenage girls from good families get pregnant every year! Who cares?

Like the ‘stuff’ you read in tabloids, none of this means anything at all!

Nevertheless, because we seem to be learning something new about Governor Palin every day, reasonable people are beginning to wonder: What might we learn about Governor Palin tomorrow, next week, or next month? And, will what we learn damage the McCain/Palin candidacy?

With questions about the Vice-Presidential candidate distracting the campaign on this, the shaky first day of the Republican Convention, some Republican strategists worry that voters will lose confidence in John McCain’s judgment and will turn to the Obama/Biden ticket in November.

Is it fair for voters to question Senator McCain’s judgment to be an effective president?

After eight years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, voters seem to be more concerned today than ever bout a candidate’s judgment, or lack thereof.

After all, the President of the United States must be capable of confronting any number of high-stake domestic and international problems at any time with reasoned, thoughtful, prescient judgment.

Since we measure judgment as a candidate’s ability to assess a situation objectively enough to come up with a sound conclusion, it is more than reasonable to question McCain’s judgment in this instance.

We can’t separate McCain’s judgment from the process he used to make this decision.

According to sources close to the campaign, Senator McCain didn’t even consider Palin as a serious candidate until he realized within the last week that the party faithful would never accept Independent Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate.

Campaign insiders told McCain that unless he did something to shake up his campaign, to draw media and public attention away from a potential Obama/Biden juggernaut, he’d risk watching his decades old desire to become President of the United States fade away . . . forever.

So, McCain turned away from Lieberman, the experienced Senator, and snapped toward Palin, the relatively unknown, inexperienced Governor of a state with fewer people than many American cities.

Because McCain would make history by selecting Palin as the first ever female Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, strategists pointed out that the campaign would benefit from lots of media attention . . . especially important after the Obama media fest that dominated the airwaves for four prior days straight.

As if he wanted to get the decision behind him and move on, John McCain had only one face-to-face interview with Sarah Palin and that was last Thursday, the day before he was scheduled to announce the name of his running mate.

Aides say that the moment the interview was over, McCain immediately asked Palin to be his running mate.

She said yes, he made history, the campaign got media attention, and America began to wonder.

Does John McCain have the judgment to be president?

Guess we'd better ask Sarah Palin.

Copyright © 2008 by l.t. Dravis. All rights reserved.

If you have questions, comments, or concerns, Email me at LTDAssociates@msn.com (goes right to my desk) and since I personally answer every Email, I look forward to hearing from you soon.

POLITICAL Conventions . . . why bother?

By l.t. Dravis

DENVER, COLORADO – Friday, August 22, 2008 . . . Here we go again. Another four years has passed, convention fever is back, and it’s everywhere.

The Democratic Convention in Denver will hit us full-on from Monday, August 25 through Thursday, August 28. We’ll be inundated with 24 hour coverage from cable news networks, plus network specials every night, plus whatever coverage the good folks at PBS can come up with.

Every thinking voter has to ask the obvious question, “How much time do I want to spend watching millionaire celebrity politicians pat themselves and each other on the back while they make promises they’ll never keep?”

Don’t think that’s the case?

Okay, then, let’s compare some of 2004 Republican nominee George W. Bush’s convention rhetoric to his actions after he was elected to a second term as President of the United States.

In his acceptance speech, nominee and incumbent President George W. Bush said, “In the work we have done and the work we will do, I am fortunate to have a superb Vice President. I have counted on Dick Cheney’s calm and steady judgment in difficult days, and I’m honored to have him at my side.”

I have to ask (permit me a snicker here, will you?), but how has Dick Cheney’s ‘calm and steady judgment’ made your personal or professional life better in the past four years?

Nominee Bush then said, “I believe this Nation wants steady, consistent, principled leadership and that is why, with your help, we will win this election.”

Bush’s ‘steady, consistent, principled leadership’ initially resisted the establishment of a 911 commission, then ultimately ignored most of the commission’s recommendations, failed to finish the reconstruction in New Orleans three years after Hurricane Katrina, supported paying hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to newspaper columnists to promote administration policies, implemented surveillance of American citizens’ Emails, internet activity, phone calls, and text messaging without court warrants, played political games with the careers of United States Attorneys, commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence for convictions on four counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements, and on and on.

Nominee Bush said, “To create jobs, my plan will encourage investment and expansion by restraining federal spending, reducing regulation, and making the tax relief permanent. To create jobs, we will make our country less dependent on foreign sources of energy.”

So, in light of an impending $10 trillion dollar national debt and $120 a barrel oil, how honest was the nominee about his plan to ‘restrain federal spending and ‘make our country less dependent on foreign sources of energy’?

The nominee then said, “Another drag on our economy is the current tax code, which is a complicated mess filled with special interest loopholes, saddling our people with more than six billion hours of paperwork and headache every year. The American people deserve and our economic future demands a simpler, fairer, pro-growth system. In a new term, I will lead a bipartisan effort to reform and simplify the federal tax code.”

What ever happened to any bipartisan effort to simplify the tax code? I don’t remember it . . . do you?

Bush also said, “We will provide low-income Americans with better access to health care: In a new term, I will ensure every poor county in America has a community or rural health center.”

Don’t think every poor county in America has a health center . . . if they do, I couldn’t find a list.

The nominee then wound up his acceptance speech by saying, “In all these proposals, we seek to provide not just a government program, but a path -- a path to greater opportunity, more freedom, and more control over your own life. And the path begins with our youngest Americans. To build a more hopeful America, we must help our children reach as far as their vision and character can take them. Tonight, I remind every parent and every teacher, I say to every child: No matter what your circumstance, no matter where you live, your school will be the path to promise of America.”

Nice rhetoric, but given the state of schools in too many parts of America today, it turned out to be nothing more than another empty promise.

I won’t waste your time by quoting the gratuitous compliments and promises made by Dick Cheney, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Bernard Kerik, Bob Taft, Sam Brownback, Bill Frist, Elizabeth Dole, Lynne Cheney, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Zell Miller and others . . . but there was a bunch of them.

In any case, as I reflect on what I’ve just written, I’m thinking it would be a better use of my time next week to catch up on some reading.

I could start Monday night with Audacity of Hope and end Thursday with Faith of My Fathers.

Then I’d be free Friday to turn the TV on again and watch the 6^th season debut of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO.

What do you think?

Copyright © 2008 by l.t. Dravis. All rights reserved.

If you have questions, comments, or concerns, Email me at LTDAssociates@msn.com (goes right to my desk) and since I personally answer every Email, I look forward to hearing from you soon.